PHYSICAL CONTEMPLATION OF THE UNIVERSE. 147 



to the "gate of the interior sea" a peculiar importance. 

 Ever stretching forwards towards that which lay beyond, 

 one maritime people after another, Phoenicians, Greeks, 

 Arabians, Catalans, Majorcans, Frenchmen from Dieppe 

 and La Kochelle, Genoese, Venetians, Portuguese, and 

 Spaniards, made successive efforts to penetrate onwards in 

 the Atlantic Ocean, which was long regarded as a miry, 

 shallow, misty sea of darkness (mare tenebrosum) ; until, aa 

 it were station by station, by the Canaries and the Azores, 

 they at last arrived at the New Continent, which, however, 

 Northmen had already reached at an earlier period and by 

 another route. 



When the expeditions of Alexander were making known 

 to the Greeks the regions of the East, considerations on 

 the form of the Earth were leading the great Stagirite 

 ( 211 ) to the idea of the nearness of India to the Pillars 

 of Hercules; Strabo even formed the conjecture, that in 

 the northern hemisphere perhaps in the parallel which 

 passes through the Pillars, through the island of Ehodes, 

 and through Thinse " there might exist intermediately be- 

 tween the shores of western Europe and eastern Asia several 

 other habitable lands" ( 212 ). The assignment of the 

 locality of such lands in the continuation of the length of 

 the Mediterranean was connected with a grand geographical 

 view put forward by Eratosthenes and extensively enter- 

 tained in antiquity, according to which the whole of the 

 old continent, in its widest extent from west to east, nearly 

 in the parallel of 36, would form an almost continuous line 

 of elevation ( 213 ). 



But the expedition of Colseus of Samos not only marked 

 an epoch which offered to the Greek races, and to the 



